Twitter ha anunciado que podrá censurar cualquier comentario que sea delictivo en el país desde el que se publica, a petición de las autoridades locales y atendiendo a las peculiaridades de cada gobierno a la hora de entender la libertad de expresión. El tuit sería invisible para los usuarios del país donde sea supuestamente delictivo, aunque permanecería visible para el resto del mundo.

De esta manera se reducirían las posibilidades de que esta herramienta pueda volverse a utilizar para canalizar la necesidad de expresarse y organizarse de activistas, periodistas, empresarios o líderes de opinión en aquellos países donde no estar de acuerdo con lo oficial sea, de una manera u otra, delito.

Twitter traiciona al fenómeno que le ha encumbrado como referencia para la historia, para los libros sobre política y libertades que se escribirán dentro de pocos años.

¿Por qué Twitter ha tomado esta decisión?

Si hay que responder en una palabra: China.

Twitter es una de las redes sociales más importantes del mundo y, sin embargo, no acaba de encontrar su modelo de negocio. Tiene 100 millones de usuarios activos en el mundo y no es capaz de sacarle tanto partido como Facebook, Google o incluso otras más pequeñas.

Por eso Twitter, como empresa, necesita expandirse: necesita el favor, la acogida, de países donde la disidencia no se permite. Yahoo o Google ya lo hicieron antes: enarbolar la libertad de expresión hasta el día que quieres penetrar en el mercado chino.

Dice textualmente el comunicado de Twitter:

“Casi todos los países del mundo consideran que la libertad de expresión es un derecho humano. (…) Muchos otros países piensan que la libertad de expresión conlleva una responsabilidad y tiene unos límites”.

Bravo. Dicho así parece que la libertad de expresión es de por sí irresponsable y no tiene límites en los países donde se considera un derecho fundamental.

Y a Twitter se le escapan algunos detalles: que han crecido gracias al uso de millones de personas en busca de libertad en esos países (Egipto, Túnez, Libia…), que en su momento favorecieron las protestas dentro de Irán, por ejemplo, o que han recibido más publicidad de la que nunca pudimos soñar gracias a su áurea revolucionaria. Hay que suponer que esto último se ha convertido en un problema comercial.

Ilustración: (cc) Shahab Shakib Passand

Twitter copia a Google. Y no es casual: quien pilota esta decisión dentro de la compañía es Alexander Macgillivray, que había trabajado en Google y donde diseño la estrategia de censura para ampliar el mercado. Usar el buscador en China o Marruecos es una experiencia muy recomendable.

En China, por ejemplo, lo que triunfa no es Twitter sino Weibo, que cuenta con cierta tolerancia del gobierno y que censura cuando hay que censurar. Y la empresa californiana quiere comerle terreno en un lugar donde se exige que las empresas de lo digital, a los reguladores y a la policía trabajen “más duramente” para limpiar los sitios web, blogs y microblogs de “rumores tóxicos”.

Desde ese punto de partida, las valoraciones menores sobre lo que particularmente no nos gusta de Twitter quedan empequeñecidas. Que a veces uno recibe insultos, amenazas, suplantaciones o que hay perfiles muy nocivos socialmente… Cierto. Pero está en juego mucho más.

Prueba a amenazar de muerte a alguien en Twitter. Es delito y serás detenido por ello. Prueba a compartir contenido pederasta. Tu IP será rastreada y ve contratando un abogado. Para juzgar ya está la justicia de cada país. Si alguien hace un uso indebido de su capacidad de expresión, hay garantías públicas contra eso. Y si hay un problema de cómo perseguir delitos cometidos contra ti desde fuera de tu país, entonces la solución es la justicia universal y el derecho internacional, no la censura.

Otra trampa argumental: igual que los medios de comuniación moderan los comentarios, ¿por qué Twitter no va a hacerlo como corresponsable de lo que se publica? Porque Twitter no es un medio, no editorializa, no construye un discurso propio. Twitter es una herramienta. O quiere serlo, al menos.

Si alguien recibe una amenaza de muerte por teléfono, ¿se nos ocurriría pedirle a la empresa telefónica que le corte la línea como solución al problema?

Y por fin hay un asunto puramente práctico: Twitter es muy débil como gestora de comunidad. Es un producto desarrollado más por el ingenio colectivo de sus usuarios que por la propia empresa. Cualquiera que haya tenido alguna vez algún problema como usuario de Twitter y haya intentado ponerse en contacto con sus servicios técnicos, habrá comprobado que la atención al usuario es simplemente inexistente. Si Twitter no tiene la capacidad, o no quiere tenerla, de manejar a su comunidad de usuarios, ¿cómo cree que puede estar pendiente de todos los supuestos comentarios delictivos? Para eso hay un atajo peligroso: la censura previa, los perfiles desautorizados por petición de las autoridades de cada país.

Fotografía de la Plaza Tahrir de Egipto subida ayer a Twitter por @sandmonkey

We love the prices of our iPhones and iPads.

We love the super-high profit margins of Apple, Inc., the maker of our iPhones and iPads.

And that's why it's disconcerting to remember that the low prices of our iPhones and iPads — and the super-high profit margins of Apple — are only possible because our iPhones and iPads are made with labor practices that would be illegal in the United States.

And it's also disconcerting to realize that the folks who make our iPhones and iPads not only don't have iPhones and iPads (because they can't afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen them.

This is a complex issue. But it's also an important one. And it's only going to get more important as the world's economies continue to become more intertwined.

(And the issue obviously concerns a lot more companies than Apple. Almost all of the major electronics manufacturers make their stuff in China. One difference with Apple, though, is the magnitude of the company's profit margin and profits. Apple could afford to pay its manufacturers more or hold them to higher standards and still be extremely competitive and profitable.)

Last week, PRI's "This American Life" did a special on Apple's manufacturing. The show featured (among others) the reporting of Mike Daisey, the man who does the one-man stage show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," and The NYT's Nicholas Kristof, whose wife's family is from China.

You can read a transcript of the whole show here. Here are some details:

• The Chinese city of Shenzhen is where most of our "crap" is made. 30 years ago, Shenzhen was a little village on a river. Now it's a city of 13 million people — bigger than New York.
• Foxconn, one of the companies that builds iPhones and iPads (and products for many other electronics companies), has a factory in Shenzhen that employs 430,000 people.
• There are 20 cafeterias at the Foxconn Shenzhen plant. They each serve 10,000 people.
• One Foxconn worker Mike Daisey interviewed, outside factory gates manned by guards with guns, was a 13-year old girl. She polished the glass of thousands of new iPhones a day.
• The 13-year old said Foxconn doesn't really check ages. There are on-site inspections, from time to time, but Foxconn always knows when they're happening. And before the inspectors arrive, Foxconn just replaces the young-looking workers with older ones.
• In the first two hours outside the factory gates, Daisey meets workers who say they are 14, 13, and 12 years old (along with plenty of older ones). Daisey estimates that about 5% of the workers he talked to were underage.
• 

  Jordan Pouille

  The dormitories.

  Daisey assumes that Apple, obsessed as it is with details, must know this. Or, if they don't, it's because they don't want to know.
• Daisey visits other Shenzhen factories, posing as a potential customer. He discovers that most of the factory floors are vast rooms filled with 20,000-30,000 workers apiece. The rooms are quiet: There's no machinery, and there's no talking allowed. When labor costs so little, there's no reason to build anything other than by hand.
• A Chinese working "hour" is 60 minutes — unlike an American "hour," which generally includes breaks for Facebook, the bathroom, a phone call, and some conversation. The official work day in China is 8 hours long, but the standard shift is 12 hours. Generally, these shifts extend to 14-16 hours, especially when there's a hot new gadget to build. While Daisey is in Shenzhen, a Foxconn worker dies after working a 34-hour shift.
• Assembly lines can only move as fast as their slowest worker, so all the workers are watched (with cameras). Most people stand.
• The workers stay in dormitories. In a 12-by-12 cement cube of a room, Daisey counts 15 beds, stacked like drawers up to the ceiling. Normal-sized Americans would not fit in them.
• Unions are illegal in China. Anyone found trying to unionize is sent to prison.
• Daisey interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using "hexane," an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.
• Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs. Once the workers' hands no longer work, obviously, they're canned.
• One former worker had asked her company to pay her overtime, and when her company refused, she went to the labor board. The labor board put her on a black list that was circulated to every company in the area. The workers on the black list are branded "troublemakers" and companies won't hire them.
• One man got his hand crushed in a metal press at Foxconn. Foxconn did not give him medical attention. When the man's hand healed, it no longer worked. So they fired him. (Fortunately, the man was able to get a new job, at a wood-working plant. The hours are much better there, he says — only 70 hours a week).
• The man, by the way, made the metal casings of iPads at Foxconn. Daisey showed him his iPad. The man had never seen one before. He held it and played with it. He said it was "magic."

Importantly, Shenzhen's factories, as hellish as they are, have been a boon to the people of China. Liberal economist Paul Krugman says so. NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof says so. Kristof's wife's ancestors are from a village near Shenzhen. So he knows of what he speaks. The "grimness" of the factories, Kristof says, is actually better than the "grimness" of the rice paddies.

So, looked at that way, Apple is helping funnel money from rich American and European consumers to poor workers in China. Without Foxconn and other assembly plants, Chinese workers might still be working in rice paddies, making $50 a month instead of $250 a month (Kristof's estimates. In 2010, Reuters says, Foxconn workers were given a raise to $298 per month, or $10 a day, or less than $1 an hour). With this money, they're doing considerably better than they once were. Especially women, who had few other alternatives.

But, of course, the reason Apple assembles iPhones and iPads in China instead of America, is that assembling them here or Europe would cost much, much more — even with shipping and transportation. And it would cost much, much more because, in the United States and Europe, we have established minimum acceptable standards for the treatment and pay of workers like those who build the iPhones and iPads.

Foxconn, needless to say, doesn't come anywhere near meeting these minimum standards.

If Apple decided to build iPhones and iPads for Americans using American labor rules, two things would likely happen:

• The prices of iPhones and iPads would go up
• Apple's profit margins would go down

Neither of those things would be good for American consumers or Apple shareholders. But they might not be all that awful, either. Unlike some electronics manufacturers, Apple's profit margins are so high that they could go down a lot and still be high. And some Americans would presumably feel better about loving their iPhones and iPads if they knew that the products had been built using American labor rules.

In other words, Apple could probably afford to use American labor rules when building iPhones and iPads without destroying its business.

So it seems reasonable to ask why Apple is choosing NOT to do that.

(Not that Apple is the only company choosing to avoid American labor rules and costs, of course — almost all manufacturing companies that want to survive, let alone thrive, have to reduce production costs and standards by making their products elsewhere.)

The bottom line is that iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country — because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair.

That's not a value judgment. It's a fact.

So, next time you pick up your iPhone or iPad, ask yourself how you feel about that.

Con ayuda de algunos lectores del blog y de las oportunas capturas de PerúFail hemos elaborado una lista de 20 #FAILS  generados por los Community Manager a lo largo de 2011, una deliciosa selección de las ‘metidas de pata’ de responsables de cuentas de marcas y medios.

Buenas experiencias para tener en cuenta y aprender.  Nos queda claro que las disculpas siempre serán la mejor salida. Y si a esas disculpas le suman un toque de humor e inteligencia, la audiencia será un poquito más piadosa.

Si tienen más imágenes #FAIL no duden en compartirlas aquí

I hear it everywhere. The web is dead, apps are the future. 

I heard it first on the cover of Wired Magazine in March 1997 and again in August 2010. I was so impressed I added it to my blogroll, as a reminder to all that you're reading a dead medium.  

That was said in jest, of course.  

I'll keep playing here while the rest of you flirt with apps. I'll be here when you come back. I know it's going to happen. Here's why. 

Linking. 

Visualize each of the apps they want you to use on your iPad or iPhone as a silo. A tall vertical building. It might feel very large on the inside, but nothing goes in or out that isn't well-controlled by the people who created the app. That sucks!  

The great thing about the web is linking. I don't care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can't link in and out of your world, it's not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don't need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point. 

We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money. It pleases the money folk to think that the wild and crazy and unregulated world of the web is no longer threatening them. That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.  

I'll stay with the web. 

Imagine a new hot-dog selling venture. Let’s also say there’s only one supplier to purchase hot dogs from. Instead of simply charging a fixed price for hot dogs, that supplier demands the HIGHER of the following: $1 per hot dog sold OR $2 for every customer served OR 50 percent of all revenues for anything sold in the store.In addition, the supplier requires a two-year minimum order of 300 hot dogs per day, payable all in advance. If fewer hot dogs are sold, there is no refund. If more than 300 hot dogs are sold each day, payments to the supplier are generated by calculating $2 per customer or 50 percent of total revenues, so an additional payment is due to the supplier. After the first two years, the supplier can unilaterally adjust any of the pricing terms and the shop can never switch suppliers.

Would this imaginary hot dog establishment be able to generate a profit? Never, because the economics are one-sided. The supplier will always elect the formula that captures the largest amount of money for themselves, completely disregarding the financial viability of the store. If the store miraculously managed to generate a profit, the landlord would simply raise the rates after two years.

Such economic demands may be imaginary for the hot dog business, but they are the stark reality that every digital-music subscription service such as Spotify, Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, and others must confront. These details aren’t well-known because digital music service deals are always wrapped tightly with strict non-disclosure agreements.

For the first time, people are talking, and these previously secret demands are being made public. The specifics are even more onerous than the hot dog example cited above. Together they doom online audio companies to a life of subjugation to the labels, as you will learn below.

Here are some specific demands that digital music companies are compelled to agree to:

With most other businesses, if a supplier makes unreasonable demands, a retailer can turn to other providers. Since copyright law gives record labels and publishers a government-granted monopoly, no such option is possible with music. Digital vendors have only two options: Accept the terms or not include those songs in their offering.

The sale of EMI to other music companies means there will shortly be only three major labels. If a music service rejects terms offered by a label, then that service’s offering will have an enormous hole in their catalog of 25 percent or more of popular songs. In the business world, a monopoly leads to lopsided economics, and the subscription digital music business is a poignant illustration of that.

Final note: Online radio services such as Pandora take advantage of a government-supervised license available only to radio broadcasters thus sidestepping dealing with record labels. While the per-song fees are daunting, they bypass virtually all of the terms listed above.

A 15-year veteran of the digital music business, Michael Robertson is the founder and former CEO of MP3.com and is currently CEO of personal cloud music service MP3tunes as well as the radio recording service DAR.fm. He can be reached at michael@michaelrobertson.com. He would like to thank Paul Petrick for his contribution to this piece.

The Huffington Post has just signed a deal with Spanish newspaper El Pais to produce a new version of the caffeinated news brand Arianna Huffington has made famous in the United States.

And with a name like Huffington, the only thing that needs tweaking is the article.

El Huffington Post, as it will be called, will carve out a nook in the Madrid headquarters of the top-selling Spanish daily to house the website's local team.

"It's going to be very, very rooted in Spanish culture and politics, but with The Huffington Post template of curation, original reporting and blogging," Huffington said in an interview with Capital.

The deal closed on Thursday.

"I'm really excited about this partnering model," said Huffington, who also recently signed off on a French site (Le Huffington Post), with the Paris-based paper Le Monde. "We are starting with great brands and we're able to really work with their teams and their knowledge of the local journalistic scene and their access."

These cross-continent collaborations are new territory for The Huffington Post, whose relationship with analogous U.S. news titles has been contentious. No longer is the many-verticaled web titan merely a scraper that feeds on the hard work of legacy news outlets. But nor are legacy news outlets entirely simpatico with the aggregation practices that still account for a significant slice of HuffPo's traffic. It would be hard to imagine The Huffington Post shacking up with, say, The New York Times. But Huffington's brand is having a good road show.

Abroad, The Huffington Post benefits from its partners' infrastructure, credibility and resources; their partners in turn benefit from HuffPo's digital savvy and from having access to the prodigious volume of content it is known to churn out on a daily basis.

No equity has changed hands in the deal. Rather, Huffington called it a "very simple partnership" in which newly formed, jointly held entities "share expenses, risk and profits."

"For them," she said, "it's going to be like a laboratory where they can see how certain things work and decide what they want to take and use on their own website. For example, we were talking to the editor of El Pais as we were showing them what we're planning to do, and he joked that for them to have a splash [headline] like The Huffington Post has many times a day, it would have to be the Third World War. But this is part of the HuffPost way, where we are basically saying, 'This is what we think is the most important story of the hour.' So you know, things like that—the way we deal with comments, with engagement."

Huffington is lining up a New York-based team of part-time translators who can quickly convert copy to English from Spanish, French, or whatever other languages Huffington Post stories eventually come in. (She's also eyeing sites in Germany, Italy, Japan, Turkey and Brazil.)

"There will be content-sharing across borders," she said.

For now, the international operations, which have already been launched in England and Canada, look much like the 6-and-a-half-year-old Huffington Post flagship did in its infancy, said Huffington—nimble teams of fewer than 10 full-time employees that will scale as they become profitable. (The Huffington Post's masthead has ballooned to around 300 since the site's marriage to AOL last spring.)

But Huffington has been able to expand her stable over the past 10 months at a rate that would have seemed implausible just a year ago. The international expansion was always in the cards, she said, but it wouldn't have gotten rolling as quickly or as rapidly as it has if AOL didn't come knocking with a whopping $315 million from its coffers.

"We have this great infrastructure and the ability to move forward very quickly with multiple launches at a time," she said. "The way we would have done it would have had to be sequential—launching one and seeing how goes."

The new publication will have a broad focus.

"Spain just had an election," said Huffington, "so what's going to be happening with the new government?" Also: "The state of the Spanish economy and how that's going to affect Europe and the global economy."

Additionally, the two new bedfellows "will look at what we can do in Latin America and all Spanish-speaking countries," said Huffington. "El Pais has huge credibility across the Spanish-speaking world, so we're looking at what we can do together beyond Spain."